A Campus Haunting

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The University of North Texas is known as a place to express creativity and acts as a home for the odd, strange, abnormal, and in some cases, the paranormal.

Ghosts roam the halls and corridors of this school and its many buildings. At any moment, students and faculty may have a run-in with some of the supernatural.

Wanda, the ghost of who people say was a student at UNT in the 50s, supposedly resides in this attic, where residents say she died a long time ago after an abortion she performed on herself went wrong. Paulina De Alva | Staff Photographer

Joy Houser, College of Business marketing and logistics lecturer, spent some time teaching in Matthews Hall on campus and shared an interesting tale. In Matthews 102, the room where Houser taught, there were curious instances where she would shut the door tight and it would mysteriously open during the middle of class. Sometimes, the opposite would occur where she would leave it open and it would slam shut.

Houser checked the hallways, but found no one. She and her students couldn’t explain the incidents.

“It got to where the students and I got used to it,” said Houser. “We all just assumed it was haunted.”

Along with Matthews Hall, there are some horror stories coming form Bruce Hall. It is no secret there is a ghost living in the dorm, and it is not a surprise seeing that Bruce is the oldest dorm on campus.

The ghosts of Bruce Hall have become a part of the dorm’s culture for many years now. A mural in the lobby depicts all of the alleged ghost stories through the years, and the pool hall is dedicated to the resident ghost, Wanda.

Biology senior Zoe Danielle Pratt believes there are ghosts that patrol Bruce, and she had first-hand experience.

“I didn’t believe in ghosts until I moved to Denton,” Pratt said. “Bruce Hall kind of changed that for me.”

During Pratt’s stay in the dorm, she noticed something out of the ordinary. Whenever she looked in her mirror, an obscure figure would appear behind her for a split second. Other times, she would wake up to what felt like something either getting in or leaving her bed.

“But all of that was just ‘OK, maybe I’m just going crazy,’” says Pratt. “That was all easy for me to write off.”

The most perplexing event was during her first semester when she arrived back to Denton after visiting her family in Austin. She came back to the dorm with a few belongings she brought back from home, some of which were picture frames.

Before going to sleep, Pratt hung her portraits on her walls as decoration for her room. When she awoke, she found the frames removed from the walls and neatly stacked, underneath a chair on the other side of the room.

At the time, Pratt had no roommate, and no one had been over that particular night. She said she does not sleep walk. Someone, or something, had moved her pictures that night while she slept without leaving a trace of evidence. .

A similar story takes place in Chilton Hall, where Caitlin Edgar, a criminal justice junior, works in the Chilton Computer Lab.

Back in the earlier years of the university, Chilton used to be a men’s dorm, and has since been renovated and transformed into an administration building. It houses the anthropology department, as well as various other educational facilities.

“You get this really eerie feeling when you’re in the classrooms alone and no one’s around,” Edgar said.

Edgar’s job is to assist students with any help they may need in the computer lab and to keep watch over the many cameras in Chilton Hall. While checking the cameras one night last year, she saw a student walking down an aisle in the lab. There was no class scheduled for that time and it was after hours. No one was supposed to be there.

Computer labs in Chilton are secured with locks and alarms , which require disarming codes that only employees have access to. When Edgar went to ask the mysterious student to leave, she punched in her code to unlock the door, turned on the lights and disarmed the alarm once it sounded.

She would have seen someone leave, and if there was someone in the lab before she got there the alarms would have sounded. But she arrived to find nothing.

Incidents like these are few and far between around campus, but they do happen.

“I’m not the only person who’s experienced such weird things,” Edgar said.

Featured Image: Students will find a stairwell between the first and second floor with a mural depicting an illustration of every legend UNT’s Bruce Hall houses to this day. Paulina De Alva | Staff Photographer